


These Ties That Bind

by blacklid



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Character Study, Coda, Gen, Season/Series 05
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-14
Updated: 2010-03-14
Packaged: 2017-10-26 05:29:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/279253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blacklid/pseuds/blacklid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One day, they just disappeared, but nobody talked about it because that's what Winchesters do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	These Ties That Bind

**Author's Note:**

> Refers to events through 5.07, _The Curious Case of Dean Winchester_.

It’s only four o’clock but the sky is vacant of light. He finally crests the hill and the thunderstorm meets him head on. He blurs into the miles of open field and lightning glitters on the reflective yellow lines of the pavement.

The high turn of his collar does nothing to save him. It drenches his hair, seeps down the back of his shirt and steams on his skin. After a few hours, his fist is ice from hailing a ride and he buries it deep into the pocket of his coat to get the blood and the feeling back.

 _Everything’s gonna be okay. I will be back in time. I promise._

Headlights illuminate the mud at his feet in an unsteady rhythm until one set curves into the flooded ditch and stops behind him. He almost doesn’t turn around. He almost wishes it was Dean.

 _I’m not unfaithful. I’ve never been. … You will be._

So what if she hadn’t believed along with him that he was doing the right thing; she’d let him go without a fight. Jess had trusted him. It’s surprising, how much that blind faith means now. He had walked out on their future and into the past – to find Dad, to save people he didn’t even know – and she had died for it.

He’d made a deal with Dean, and he’d never truly come back from it.

 _I can never go home._

He sleeps in five mile snatches. Night turns into sweltering day. The open windows are no help for the rain-starched sweat and grit that’s pooling at his neck and fusing with the humid anticipation under his palms; miles tunneling toward a destination that has no destiny, no past, no ‘what next’.

 _You can pretend all you want, Sammy, but sooner or later, you’re gonna have to face up to who you really are. You’re one of us._

Scrubby pine and cedar gives way to juniper and mesquite and finally to long prairie, yellow stretches of road that weary people call blankness and what he calls a clean slate.

~W~

They call it survivor’s guilt, and that’s what it would be, if he felt alive.

The lamps along the interstate are burnt out. Miles shrivel and curl away from the Impala’s growl; its breath is magnified under the bridges and drowns out the wind. The wheel is a ghost on his fingertips and his thumb rolls his ring in an invisible circle.

Every city on this spider web of blacktop is somebody’s last stop.

He is looking for off-kilter patterns in ex-sanguinated vics and questioning civvies who’ve seen Interview With The Vampire one too many times. He hopes that he doesn’t accidentally find anything, because that would mean that Sam is leaving a trail. He keeps telling himself that he isn’t hunting Sam. He knows that’s a lie.

 _I can’t do this alone. … Yes, you can. … Yeah, well, I don’t want to._

Wanting Sam’s help all those years ago had nothing to do with being alone. Sure, he let Sam think it was about finding Dad, and sometimes you keep a secret and people die, but–

 _Sam, you can’t save everyone._

When your Dad tells you that there’s a curse on your family, you help look for solutions. You split up to stay safe, to cover more ground. Dad dives deep into the science thing: unseasonal weather patterns, regional statistical outliers and increases in measureable paranormal phenomenon. Stuff flies over your head until you come back for a second and third look. 

At first, he isn’t sure about the whole science edge. He’s pretty sure that people tend to know when they have a demon problem and he’s really pretty sure that factoring possession as a stimulus for rainfall isn’t the first thing on their ‘to do’ list; it is prayer, exorcism, voodoo, hoodoo, or hocus pocus. You know, applied religion, or whatever you want to call it.

 _Dean, something is starting to happen, I think it’s serious. I need to try to figure out what’s going on … Be very careful Dean, we’re all in danger._

But in Palo Alto, no angel, no prophet, no gut feeling, no God shows up warning about encroaching evil. Dad calls and the Impala’s radio goes on the fritz as he drives away that night and those are the only signs he ever gets that Sam is in trouble.

Slicing off a Horseman’s finger and joking about Mount Doom and seeing the look in Sam’s eyes makes it all suddenly click. He twists the ring again, from Dad, his inheritance.

He doesn’t need another thirty years of vivisection for this revelation: every time signs would go haywire, Dad would shake tail and disappear, totally incommunicado, convinced that it was safer for his boys – a real life Jekyll and Hyde.

 _Watch out for your brother._

Maybe Dad had always known. Their worst monsters are themselves.

~W~

Just outside of Ashland, Kansas, he walks into a gas station. The scratchy tunes of AM radio bleed through the uneven rings of the bell above the door. He stares at the beverage center, which consists entirely of glass bottles in a musty vending machine.

 _Was it a refreshing Coke?_

He finds another ride. Nobody looks askance when he introduces himself as Randy Bachman and shakes the guy’s hand. Nobody cares enough to prod further about why the name rolls off his tongue with all the conviction of a murderer breaking bail.

 _You’re putting your family in danger. … So you either get as far away from them as possible, or you put a bullet in your head, and that’s how you keep your family safe, but there’s no getting out and there’s no going home._

The window of the Crown Vic fits his propped elbow the same way the Impala used to, his fingers slotted into the roof, obstructing the gray version of his face. The press of the glass pinches the black band around his wrist and he winces. He’s been wearing it since Dean plunked their last fifty cents into a candy machine at the Gas Mart that Christmas to make up for the Barbie.

 _He’s a superhero. … Dad’s fine. We’re fine. Trust me._

So many times, he’s forced the truth on people who said they wanted to know, when all they really wanted was a savior. Knowing the truth – knowing him – has never saved anyone from anything.

If they were really better off apart, if it was so easy for Dean to agree that he’s dangerous and watch him leave without a hint of remorse, then he shouldn’t hold anything back. He gets out his folding knife, and the guy who's driving glances over briefly but is probably too intimidated to say anything. He slides the point under the band and cuts it loose.

His mouth is dry. The tartness of those nightmares pinches at the back of his jaw until they cross over the Colorado River, thick water plaiting its way through the sand, bogged down and red and sticky at the edges.

No blood is strong enough for this.

 _I just want to go to sleep, okay?_

He cracks the window, holds the broken pieces out over the water and the wind tears them from his fingers, out into the darkness. The station wagon passes over the bridge and the borderland finally snakes away behind him.

~W~

He wonders if he'll see another January, or if he wants to. He does the math.

Sixteen to twenty-six, a seasoned veteran before Sam left for college, then three years spent hunting with his brother, dying for him. Another forty years in Hell fighting for his humanity. One year running from Hell, the next running from Heaven. Fifty-four years and counting. He's been a hunter for as long as Dad was alive.

Two lifetimes. It sounds like a prison sentence.

The whiskey burns on its way down, a false warmth. He's not sure if he drinks less or more after Sam leaves. He doesn't care.

~W~

There hasn’t been a chance to scrounge for cash since before Maryland. He knows that what he has left will last a few hundred miles at most.

Colorful signs along the highway point their arrows at nothing.

The Great Plains Motel is wide open isolation and it’s as good a place as any when your money runs out. A former Marine, Will Hoyt is only too pleased to have a fellow vet named Keith Richards tending his bar – good for tips.

He walks into the single room with a kitchen, tears the batteries out of the smoke alarm, dumps his past into the sink and lights it up.

 _It’ll be better when you wake up. You’ll see. Promise._

Keeping his secret is the only way he can save them now.

 _You’re running. That’s what got me killed. … No. … Sooner or later the past catches up to you and you know what happens then? People die. Baby, the people closest to you die. … Don’t worry because I won’t make that mistake again._

Except there's no such thing as secrets.

~W~

He lives for a week 'Combing the Westfold' as Dad would have put it: when you're being told that you're completely screwed, you grow another pair and hack away at every evil thing you can find to make up for it. He's never had much interest in the history of the English kings – or the Mycenaean tablets or Herodotus either – but some things just stick.

 _You're gonna die and this is what you're gonna become._

As in the royal you... well, screw that noise. When he denies his brother, they live another three days in a reality that should never be. There's nothing downright Biblical about that at all.

Blood is thicker than water. He doesn't know why they shouldn't have the choice.

What he knows is that the old gods are pissed off at the new gods, that Sam is still scary good with a blade, that the Antichrist is a twelve year old surfer wannabe with a rictus for the truth that makes his hair stand on end, that stale meat is worse on your bones than it is in your burgers and that's the last time he'll ever almost die of a heart attack if he can help it. Screw that, too.

He takes off his father's ring and the bracelet and stares at them, wraps them into the stained folds of a rag and stows them away.

 _Great. Now I feel naked._

But he doesn't – not this time. This time, it's more like the day he was born.

Screw their inheritance. They're going to make their own rules.


End file.
